Thought Leadership

The Future of Programmatic Audio?

October 31, 2018

By Nina Harvey, Head of Audio, Rubicon Project

Nina Harvey, Head of Audio at Rubicon Project talks about the future of programmatic audio.

Audio: What are the current trends?

So Rubicon is seeing great activity on the buy side with regards to consistent buying activity from brands accessing our audio inventory, as well as new brands coming in and then continuing to invest in audio.

Where is audio headed in 2019?

Twenty-nineteen, I think we’re going to see much more scale around smart speakers. It offers a great opportunity for brands to be able to connect with a wider audience. However, there are some things that we as an industry are going to have to think about in regards to this. So you now will have multiple people listening to either music or audio content, spoken work content. So householding, and how you attribute against many people now listening to one smart speaker, and that content and the brands that are advertising through them, is something that we need to address. Alongside that, ensuring that we have consent to be able to deliver advertising to them is also really important, particularly with GDPR. And making sure that when you have a device that doesn’t necessarily have a screen which you can provide explicit consent on, that we as an industry have thought about how it is that we can ensure that we have got the appropriate consent from a user to deliver advertising on a smart speaker.

I’m Nina Harvey, I work at Rubicon Project as Head of Audio, working with our existing sellers, new business partnerships, buyer teams and our product to develop our audio solution.